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Installation

Using Bundler, add to development group in Gemfile and set to not be required automatically:

group:developmentdogem'brakeman',:require=>falseend

From source:

gem build brakeman.gemspec
gem install brakeman*.gem

For Slim Users

Slim v3.0.0 dropped support for Ruby 1.8.7. Install a version of slim compatible with your Ruby.

Ruby Version

Gemfile

Command Line

Ruby 1.8.7

gem 'slim', '< 3.0'

$ gem install slim --version '< 3.0'

Ruby 1.9+

gem 'slim'

$ gem install slim

Usage

brakeman[app_path]

It is simplest to run Brakeman from the root directory of the Rails application. A path may also be supplied.

Basic Options

For a full list of options, use brakeman --help or see the OPTIONS.md file.

To specify an output file for the results:

brakeman -o output_file

The output format is determined by the file extension or by using the -f option. Current options are: text, html, tabs, json, markdown, and csv.

Multiple output files can be specified:

brakeman -o output.html -o output.json

To suppress informational warnings and just output the report:

brakeman-q

Note all Brakeman output except reports are sent to stderr, making it simple to redirect stdout to a file and just get the report.

To see all kinds of debugging information:

brakeman-d

Specific checks can be skipped, if desired. The name needs to be the correct case. For example, to skip looking for default routes (DefaultRoutes):

brakeman -x DefaultRoutes

Multiple checks should be separated by a comma:

brakeman -x DefaultRoutes,Redirect

To do the opposite and only run a certain set of tests:

brakeman -t SQL,ValidationRegex

If Brakeman is running a bit slow, try

brakeman--faster

This will disable some features, but will probably be much faster (currently it is the same as --skip-libs --no-branching). WARNING: This may cause Brakeman to miss some vulnerabilities.

By default, Brakeman will return 0 as an exit code unless something went very wrong. To return an error code when warnings were found:

brakeman-z

To skip certain files that Brakeman may have trouble parsing, use:

brakeman --skip-files file1,file2,etc

To compare results of a scan with a previous scan, use the JSON output option and then:

brakeman --compare old_report.json

This will output JSON with two lists: one of fixed warnings and one of new warnings.

Brakeman will ignore warnings if configured to do so. By default, it looks for a configuration file in config/brakeman.ignore.
To create and manage this file, use:

brakeman-I

Warning information

See WARNING_TYPES for more information on the warnings reported by this tool.

Warning context

The HTML output format provides an excerpt from the original application source where a warning was triggered. Due to the processing done while looking for vulnerabilities, the source may not resemble the reported warning and reported line numbers may be slightly off. However, the context still provides a quick look into the code which raised the warning.

Confidence levels

Brakeman assigns a confidence level to each warning. This provides a rough estimate of how certain the tool is that a given warning is actually a problem. Naturally, these ratings should not be taken as absolute truth.

There are three levels of confidence:

High - Either this is a simple warning (boolean value) or user input is very likely being used in unsafe ways.

Medium - This generally indicates an unsafe use of a variable, but the variable may or may not be user input.